All that is Solid … is a radical blog that seeks to promote a future beyond capital's social universe. "All that is solid melts into air" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto', 1848).

Arun Kundnani will be taking part in a number of events across the UK to talk about his new book. See below for further details.

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Jameel Scott thought he was exercising his rights when he went to challenge an Israeli official’s lecture at Manchester University. But the teenager’s presence at the protest with fellow socialists made him the subject of police surveillance for the next two years. Counterterrorism agents visited his parents, his relatives, his school. They asked him for activists’ names and told him not to attend demonstrations. They called his mother and told her to move the family to another neighborhood. Although he doesn’t identify as Muslim, Jameel had become another face of the presumed ‘homegrown’ terrorist.

The new front in the War on Terror is the ‘homegrown enemy,’ people who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across the UK. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed – at least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda ‘sympathisers,’ and in another operation included almost 300 children fifteen and under among the potential extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in just five years. However, the official accounts of ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ that underpin these policies fail to grasp the real causes of political violence. Furthermore, public debate has ignored the impacts of such surveillance on ‘suspect communities’ targeted – especially young Muslims.

Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations across the US and the UK, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. Arun Kundnani looks at the root of our domestic anti-terror policies to expose the anxiety, intolerance, and racism that inform them.

ARUN KUNDNANI is an Adjunct Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and teaches terrorism studies at John Jay College. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Leiden University, Netherlands, an Open Society Fellow, and the Editor of the journal Race and Class. He is the author of The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain. He lives in New York.

“An important and moving investigation of the costs of the ‘war on terror’ for those who have been its targets, including the thousands of innocent Muslims who have been infiltrated, entrapped, and surveilled in the search for the radicalized terrorist among us. Kundnani gives eloquent voice to the communities that have been regulated, watched, and silenced by the national security state.” David Cole, author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism

“A bold new look at the much discussed issue of surveillance, documenting how it impacts the communities most affected – American and British Muslims. With incisive reporting from across the US and the UK, combined with trenchant analysis, Arun Kundnani captures what it feels like to be a ‘suspect population.’” Deepa Kumar, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire

“This timely and urgent analysis carefully examines the ideologies and law enforcement strategies that undergird the domestic War on Terror. What Kundnani finds is disturbing: sweeping, specious radicalization theory and racialized assumptions about the nature of Islam drive domestic counterterrorism practices. This has had devastating consequences for the rights and liberties of Muslims and the state of constitutional protections in the US and UK.” Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

“An incisive, scholarly, bold, and convincing critique of the never-ending ‘War on Terror,’ whose roots extend far beyond the tragedy of 9/11. An important work.” Wajahat Ali, cohost of Al Jazeera America’s The Stream and author of The Domestic Crusaders